


Emergency Dream Broadcast

by lady_mab



Category: Johannes Cabal - Jonathan L. Howard
Genre: Dream Sequence, Gen, Welcome to Night Vale - Freeform, only not
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-01-27
Updated: 2014-01-27
Packaged: 2018-01-10 07:33:09
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,409
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1156850
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/lady_mab/pseuds/lady_mab
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>The following is a test of the Emergency Dream Broadcast System. <br/>In the event of a real emergency, you would be experiencing a dream in which you were in the neighborhood where you grew up<br/>only all the houses are now black, featureless cylinders</p>
            </blockquote>





	Emergency Dream Broadcast

**Author's Note:**

  * For [thewriter8](https://archiveofourown.org/users/thewriter8/gifts).



> We have too much fun crossing WTNV over with Cabal. I asked her if I should do this, she said "YES" and then I never actually posted it.

Johannes Cabal wasn’t a man given to the pastime of pacing. He wasn’t a man given to pastimes, and pacing was the most useless of all of the possible time wasters ever.

And yet, here, he could do nothing but walk. One step after another, meters, kilometers, aeons passed as he wandered. He went absolutely nowhere, so he could only consider this pacing.

He couldn’t remember how he got here in the first place, wherever ‘here’ was. One moment, he was in his lab, arguing with an inanimate object (another terrible pastime) about its inability to function the way he needed it to. He got up, pulled off his gloves, and turned in time to see the flash of the--

The what?

Was it an explosion? Did one of his chemical mixes overheat and cause a fatal reaction?

Fatal. Hm.

Cabal mused over this word as he walked. There was nothing to look at but tall dark cylinders, so he stared at the ground passing beneath his feet.

Knowing his run of luck, it was completely possible that he died. It didn’t quite feel like the last time he had died, but at the time, he was soulless and it was a (relatively) controlled experiment. This time, it wasn’t, so there were bound to be differences.

Or perhaps it was a dream, though this did little to settle the sensation of displeasure at his current predicament. Dreams were useless. He knew this to be true with every fiber of his being. Useless scare tactics the brain utilized in an attempt to reason through things it couldn’t understand.

Only an endless universe of tall black cylinders aligned in moderately recognizable patterns was not exactly what he expected from an afterlife. ‘Dull’ didn’t even begin to describe it.

So on he walked, step after step, meters, kilometers, aeons, and in the back of his mind, he wondered if there shouldn’t be something more.

His feet paused as he passed one of million identical clusters of featureless cylinders. They paused before his brain did, and it took several non-existent seconds for it to slow down and retreat to where his feet remained hesitantly rooted.

Cabal turned, slowly, not exactly fearing another explosion, but definitely harboring trepidation for whatever he would see.

All the hesitation and trepidation in the endless world could not prepare him for what he saw.

Or, more likely, thought he saw.

Despite the way the cylinders continued on down the ‘lane’ (for lack of a better word, he began to identify the patterns as if streets on a map), just like the ones before it, after it, behind him, everywhere -- despite all that, he thought of his childhood neighborhood.

Back when the house was part of society, when he didn’t know what death was like, or the sting of failure and the taste of disappointment.

His feet started down the lane before his brain could either confirm or deny the decision. It was still stuck there on the invisible curb, reeling, struggling to make sense of what his eyes saw and his heart felt.

His mind overlayed the images of the houses over the cylinders as he passed them, the sound of the soles of his shoes scuffing over the ground replacing the cacophony of life that he remembered.

Odd, that he should think of this neighborhood as ‘home’ when it hadn’t been in ages. After everything crumbled around him, he refused to acknowledge the memories associated with that place. It only served to leave a sour taste in his mouth and a roiling at the pit of his stomach.

The houses have started to repeat in his head before he realized that he still hasn’t reached the one that he is looking for. Twice, three times, and still he hasn’t reached the space his own house should occupy.

There’s a figure at the end of the street, the first he’s seen his entire lifetime in this world.

“H-Horst?” The name is out of his mouth before he can stop it. He’s amazed by how quickly he could revert back to that naive little boy despite all his attempts to reject that time. That boy isn’t him, should never have to become him. But it’s that boy’s voice that always manages to clog his throat and force out strange noises in the forms of words whenever his brother is involved.

That boy shouldn’t have to know what happens to his brother, and so he swallows down the next attempt at words.

The figure remained still, as featureless as the cylinders it observes. It could be the world attempting to compensate for his memories, or it could just be nothing. Was it even possible to see mirages when there was no heat to reflect off surfaces?

Cabal didn’t know, and he didn’t want to find out.

(So he thought, but his feet carried him forward anyway.)

He started to walk faster, faster and faster until his feet are pounding over the street. He ran, chest heaving in the thin atmosphere. Each towering structure swam past in a haze, but the figure at the end of the street didn’t come any closer.

An electrical current shot up through his legs and he stumbled to a stop. Running, in general, was a fairly undignified way to get places. It didn’t help any that he never could stop running in a dignified manner. He doubled over, hands on his knees, and tried to remember how to breathe like a normal human.

The unsavory feeling of someone watching him spread across his shoulders. Could it have been, perhaps, the figure at the end of the street? Did he reach there at last?

But when Johannes turned his head, all he saw was his house. The tall, featureless, black surface of his house.

His feet scraped over concrete as he dragged himself to the cylinder. Its surface absorbed every ounce of the grey ambient light. His limbs grew heavier every step he took, until even his footfalls were sucked into the column that stretched up and up into the cloudy grey sky.

He could feel the tug of it through his entire being. His face, worn and haggard, stared back at him from the smooth surface.

It took effort, deep reserves of strength he never knew he had, just to start lifting his arm. But once he started, the pull from his house, the memory of his house, helped ease the burden.

His long, slender fingers hovered over the black expanse. It radiated no heat, no cold, absolutely nothing. It was a void that wanted to swallow him up, and he wanted to listen to it.

Instead, the only thing he heard was a soft _ding_. Like a fork hitting a glass for attention, the sound of his incubator telling him that a chemical had finished, the bell on his bike.

Cabal looked up, fingers hovering mere inches from the face of the cylinder. The clouds above his head rolled and pitched, an angry sea preparing for a storm. _Wake up_ , they spelled for a brief moment.

Interesting. Perhaps he wasn’t dead after all.

Logic took over and nostalgia was quashed. He retreated one, two, fifteen steps. His hand dropped back down to his side.

_Dinner’s ready_ , he thought it said, which seemed an odd thing for his subconscious to be telling him. Maybe the ache he felt at the pit of his stomach was the primal need to feed himself, not the gut-wrenching agony of being faced with things better left buried.

He concentrated, focused all of his considerably vast intellect on the sky above him instead of the scene around him. The clouds told him _wake up_ a second time, and this time, he did.

Cabal found himself flat on his back on the cold concrete floor of his lab. In the distance, off-tune singing. In the not-so-distance, harsh whispers cursing his presence and planning a revolt.

This was home.

This version of the house was, for better or worse, home. The place he made his own after stripping it of anything that made it his family’s.

He groaned and rolled over onto his stomach. And as he levered himself to his feet, using every single surface available to heft his gravity cursed body, he thought he saw a featureless black cylinder reflecting back his face. Then the image was gone, and he was left to shake off the remains of the dream.


End file.
